Multimedia services over digital subscriber lines

Abstract

We study the problem of reliable and yet efficient multimedia communications over asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) through joint consideration of compression/coding and channel transmission techniques. The transmission of digital multimedia data requires the existing systems to be augmented with functions that can handle not only ordinary (nonmultimedia) data. In addition, the high volume of multimedia data can be handled efficiently only if all available system resources are carefully optimized. We consider the special characteristics of ADSL channels to formulate optimization criteria. We present a system where the encoder consists of a layer coder that divides and compresses the source data into coded layers of multimedia data with different performance and quality-of-service requirements. The encoded bit streams are then transmitted over a noisy channel, where channel noise may distort the data. The decoder removes all the coding and compression applied in the encoder to obtain as close as possible the original data. It is conceivable that for such a system the loss of information occurs not only during the source compression but also in the channel transmission. The source coding scheme and bit stream arrangement have a direct impact on the channel distortion. Therefore, the joint consideration of source/channel coding design is ideal to reduce the overall information loss.